How much autonomy would you like with your self-driving car? It’s a conundrum for Silicon Valley and Detroit—but not for Brenna Argall,, a research scientist at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
Argall and her colleagues are working on a smart version of a familiar off-road vehicle: a wheelchair. Backed with $2.5 million in federal grants, they hope to field a commercially feasible model within five years that leaves the user in charge but learns from what it’s told, making control simpler, reaction time faster and collision avoidance easier…
As a pre-med student, Argall became fascinated with the (still unrealized) prospect of nanobots chewing up blood clots. She was at robot-centric Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, majoring in math (and getting the pi symbol tattooed on her left wrist). After she opted for a doctorate in robotics, her research remains patient-centric.
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